Dick's stories have inspired Screamers, Total Recall,
and Blade Runner, arguably the ultimate sci-fi movie.
Are you concerned about the inevitable comparisons to Blade Runner?

Minority Report is a different film. There's darkness
to it. There's personal tragedy as well. But I think it's a little more
accessible.
I thought Ridley [Scott, director of Blade Runner]
painted a very bleak but brilliant vision of life on earth in a few years.
It's kind of acid rain and sushi. In fact, it's coming true faster than
most science fiction films come true. Blade Runner is
almost upon us. It was ultranoir.

There's a great tension between possibility and skepticism in science.
Yet skepticism is not the first word that comes to mind
when thinking of you.

Not a lot of skepticism has gotten into my work. Certainly in the last
few films - Amistad, Schindler's List, and Private Ryan,
and A.I. and Minority Report - there's been a, well, I'm
not sure I'd call it skepticism, but a being unafraid of the dark truth,
the difficult realities. I feel
as I've gotten older, I've gotten more courageous.

In 1999, you said that Minority Report would be the most
cynical film you'd ever made.

I was wrong. It changed. Because, well, it's not cynical to want to believe
that there could be a miracle - that they could stop people from killing
in the future. So in a sense, it went from being a cynical story
to being a movie about wishful thinking.

What happens to the people convicted of premurder?

They're detained. We don't say how long, but we show that they are kept
in a comatose condition in a large area called the
Hall of Containment. It looks like Arlington Cemetery because there are
these things
like headstones with the names of all those interred. There are six bodies
interred in each tube and the tubes rise vertically from the ground, and
they are constantly monitored and fed intravenously. They are not conscious,
although they do exist in a dream state. So they may dream for 25 years,
or however long their sentence goes. I would like to think that after 25
years they are released with no memory of who they are or what they did.

Or what they might have done?

Or what they might do. The cynical thing would be to believe that somebody
with homicidal tendencies can never be rehabilitated. I don't believe that.
I think they can be rehabilitated. I just didn't go there because the politics
of that debate were not part of the storytelling.

Photo by David James/Twentieth Century Fox/DreamworksPrecog Samantha Morton, jacked to the future in Minority Report.

Precognition seems like an apt metaphor for what science fiction can be
to the culture. Tell us about the precogs themselves.

Agatha [played by Samantha Morton], someone in her early twenties,
gets a chance to experience the world for the first time when she emerges
from the liquid tank. She's embryonic. She gets to see the sky for the
first time and see the clouds. And, of course, how could I not have a bunch
of wires coming out of the precogs' bald heads? I wouldn't be honoring
the genre. I had to honor the genre.

They seem like a continuation of the meeting, the melding, of machines
and people.

People personify machines all the time. We anthropomorphize our machinery,
especially our cars, and as kids our bicycles. I had a name for my bicycle
- Scatterbolt - because it kept dropping bolts on the ground all the time.
I think we've been conditioned to look upon our most useful machines as
our companions. So I don't think there's anything new or surprising about
making machines our close companions at all. A.I., for
Stanley and certainly for me, was just the next iteration between man and
the machines he creates.

Why are you so drawn to the sci-fi genre?

Every other genre has its limitations. With science fiction, you can pull
out all the stops - and it still may not be enough. So sci-fi
is really a candy store for someone with imagination.

Yet, for it to be truly effective, it must be based on reality, hence your
think tank for Minority Report and the consultants you've
used on films like A.I. and Jurassic Park.

Real science fiction always has a platform
of truth. The best is really about the preternatural, and the worst is
the kind where there's no science to the fiction, like I Married
a Monster From Outer Space.Jurassic Park would
not have been Jurassic Park had it not been for the wholly
credible aspect of cloning from DNA. I could do anything I wanted with
a Tyrannosaurus rex, with the raptors, as long as the
audience believed that dinosaurs could come back to the 20th century. And
that was all because Michael Crichton did his homework and based his book
on certain facts about cloning and the possibility of blood-sucking insects
still containing the DNA of dinosaurs a hundred million years later.

How
invigorated and hindered by new technologies are storytelling and filmmaking?

Well, we're never going to get over our
adolescent need to paint on the walls of caves - that's not ever going
to leave us. The technology may give us far better tools to communicate
our stories. The technology may also provide a theater of the mind. Someday
the entire motion picture may
take place inside the mind, and it will be the most internal experience
anyone can have: being told a story with your eyes closed, but you see
and smell and feel and interact with the story. I certainly feel that if
we had the technology today we'd be using it. We're never going to stop
telling stories.

Now the thing I'm most saddened by is the constant talk about the photochemical
process becoming a thing of Thomas Edison's past. There's a magic about
chemistry and film. Sure, a digital shot is steady. It doesn't have to
ride through the gate of a projector. And, sure, it's as clean as the OR
in a major hospital. That's exactly what's wrong with it. Film has a molecular
structure called grain; even a still of just a flower in a vase has life
because of the grain, because of the molecules in the film. Especially
if you sit in the first five rows of any movie theater, you know what I'm
talking about. The screen is alive. The screen is always alive with chaos
and excitement, and that will certainly be gone when we convert to a digital
camera and a digital projector.
I was one of the first people to use digital technology to enhance my films,
but I'm going to be the last person to use digital technology to shoot
my movies.